Cole can’t deliver for N.Y.
Bogaerts, Schwarber homer off ace as Yanks ousted by rival Boston
Xander Bogaerts and Kyle Schwarber homered off Yankees ace Gerrit Cole, and Nathan Eovaldi took a shutout into the sixth inning to help the Boston Red Sox beat New York 6-2 Tuesday night in the AL wild-card game.
Bogaerts also made a perfect relay to throw out Aaron Judge at the plate when the game was still close, sending the Red Sox into the AL Division Series against the Tampa Bay Rays. Game 1 in the best-of-five matchup is Thursday night in St. Petersburg, Florida.
With Bucky Dent in the crowd and Aaron Boone in the Yankees dugout, Boston chased Cole in the third inning and beat New York in the playoffs for the third straight time. The Yankees, who lead the majors with 27 World Series championships, have not won it all since 2009.
A year after baseball took its postseason into neutral site bubbles to protect against the pandemic, a sellout crowd of 38,324 — the biggest of the year — filled Fenway Park to rekindle one of the sport’s most passionate rivalries. Enough Yankee fans were among them to fuel a raucous back-andforth of insulting chants.
It was the fifth playoff matchup between the longtime foes, with Boston taking a 3-2 edge. That doesn’t count the 1978 AL East tiebreaker — technically regular season Game No. 163 — that the Yankees won thanks to Dent’s homer into the net above the Green Monster.
Boone, the former infielder who is now the Yankees manager, added to the heartbreak with his 11th-inning walk-off homer in Game 7 of the 2003 AL Championship Series.
The Red Sox haven’t lost to them since.
They got their revenge the
next year when they rallied after losing the first three games of the ALCS to eliminate the Yankees, then went on to win their first World Series title in 86 years. They won three more Series, in ’07, ’13 and in ’18 when they knocked out the Yankees in the divisional round.
And any lingering pain disappeared into the center field bleachers in the first inning on Tuesday night.
Unlike Dent, who barely cleared the left-field wall that sits just 310 feet from home plate, Bogaerts drilled a line drive 427 feet to straightaway center. And unlike Carlton Fisk, who contorted his body to will the ball fair in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, Bogaerts interrupted his home run trot only to flex for the Red Sox dugout.
Cole was pulled after he allowed Schwarber’s thirdinning solo shot and put two more men on with nobody out. In all, he was charged with three runs on four hits and two walks, striking out three in two-plus innings.
Eovaldi only allowed two hits through five innings before giving up a solo home run to Anthony Rizzo — Schwarber’s teammate on the 2016 Cubs championship team — that sparked the first excited cheers from the Yankees fans in the crowd.
After an infield single by Aaron Judge, Ryan Brasier relieved Eovaldi and gave up a wall single to Giancarlo Stanton. Mistakenly waved home by third base coach Phil Nevin, Judge was easily thrown out at the plate — 8-6-2 — by the team that led the majors with 43 outfield assists during the season. (The Yankees made 22 outs at home this season, tied for the most in baseball.)